Danny King wrote:I'm always missing out on words when translating. I understand the number-person suffixes and have memorized the εἰμί paradigms for present, imperfect and future indicatives, present subjunctive and present imperative. But I get totally lost when other forms appear.
To help you not miss out words, try this...
Beyond recognising the forms of individual verbs, ask yourself contextual questions such as:
Which other words are second (or third or first) person (even though they are not marked as such in the accidence of the language). In your example here, οἱ πολλοὶ ἓν σῶμά ἐσμεν ἐν χριστῷ, what person is οἱ πολλοὶ "the proletariat", "the masses"? By form it is nominative and plural, but it doesn't make clear whether it is referring to the writer and those with him, the writer and his readers, the readers, or the common people outside the Church. Within the phrase we know that οἱ πολλοὶ is the subject of an upcoming plural verb. ἐσμεν is a plural verb. It is also second person. You ought / should / are free to apply that information from the verb to the nominal phrase that it goes with.
Can I assume correctly that you work through a text in the following way?
- writing down the meanings of / over individual words, and then
- try to piece together a viable meaning from those disjointed (English) elements
You can apply the information about person to the nominal units that need it as an intermediate step. The disjointedness of the English words on your page will be a bit less if you do that.
If you wanted to go deeper than that, then look for two things in the order in which things are presented. While on paper our eyes dance about wherever to find meaning, in fact, we need to process left-to-right. Now, the first thing introduced which has you hanging for meaning, and proximity to the verb. As we just noticed, there is a big question mark over οἱ πολλοὶ as to its person, and getting to the point in the phrase where that is made clear builds an anticipation, so in effect emphasises the person by holding out on us before giving the information. Here that means like, we are left asking or wondering Who, Who Who? and then we get "We" as the answer. The copula and complement ἓν σῶμά ἐσ- are right next to each other. That proximity leaves us feeling that the verb is closely associated with the complement. The complement ἓν σῶμά then, is more important than the verb (copula) ἐσ- in this case. In this type of 1-3-2 (οἱ πολλοὶ) (ἓν σῶμά ἐσ-)(-μεν), (to number according to how it comes out in English translation), the missing part of the 1 (found in the 3) has its emphasis by anticipation and the complement / object by being the part of the sentence that the other two "balance" on. In English that would be "WE the masses are just one body". In effect, you ignored what was meant to be anticipated.
Applying that to the second phrase too, there is a dummy 1 (the disassociated) article ὁ / τὸ (anticipating nothing) to allow for the καθ’ εἷς ἀλλήλων to get pivotal ("balancing" emphasis) the most straightforwardly expressed element, and the final part μέλη which was not anticipated is simply a piece of information supplied as any other. The parallel (1-3-2) structure is retained, but with only one type of emphasis
Danny King wrote:This is what makes me feel handicapped.
I don't think the feelings that there is not enough known or able to be known ever goes away. There is always the feeling that we need to know more - in fact, that we needed to already have known it (before it was needed).